My Profile

My name is Steven Foster, a Microsoft CRM MVP, working at Intergen as the CRM Product and Marketing Manager. I have over 17 years of CRM experience delivering a multitude of CRM solutions across a number of countries. I hope you find my blog interesting!
I am also an entrepreneur reselling the HappyOrNot customer satisfaction service.

If we look at CRM projects, programmes or initiatives I believe one of the main reasons they are seen as failed was that there was no way to measure if they had been successful. In other words no metrics defined to determine what success is or means in terms of the business.

But how does a business determine the metrics to be used to measure success?

A business can categorise measurement metrics into 5 areas as discussed below. These five areas broadly speaking cover most characteristics that an organisation should consider when measuring a project.

How do you incorporate this is to your project, simple follow these steps:

At the start of the project / initiative, work with the business owners to determine which characteristics make sense for the business

Define measureable and realistic metrics around these characteristics

Measure the current process against the metrics to capture the current state

After delivery of the project, measure the new processes against the metrics

Re measure after a few months of go live to re-evaluate against metrics

As good practice communicate the metrics to the users, business champions and use the metrics to obtain buy in to the process and validate why you are investing in the business change. It’s amazing how users get hooked on to the measures and drivers and want to see the business benefits realised.

By following these simple steps you can finally put to bed whether your project was a success or not.